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The 2005 Mattei Dogan Award
(for best book published in the field of comparative research) is
awarded to Catherine Boone for Political
Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and
Institutional Choice (Cambridge). Atul Kohli
received an honorable mention for his book, State-Directed
Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global
Periphery (Cambridge).
The SCR awards the 2005 Seymour
Martin Lipset Award (for best comparative Ph.D. dissertation)
jointly to Cornelia
Woll (Institut d’études politiques de Paris and Universität
zu Köln) for her dissertation, “The Politics of Trade
Preferences: Business Lobbying on Service Trade in the United
States and the European Union,” and to Heather
Stoll (Stanford University) for “Social Cleavages, Political
Institutions and Party Systems: Putting Preferences Back into the
Fundamental Equation of Politics.”
2005 Dogan Award:
Catherine
Boone
Political
Topographies of the African State is
an impressively researched study of state-building, with broad
implications. Focusing on central government avenues of control
and extraction of local resources under both colonialism and
post-colonial regimes in three West African countries, Catherine
Boone shows how and why the different regions within a country are
ruled differently, depending on their extractive resources, the
local organization of society, and in particular the
socio-political degree of hierarchy and consequent power base of
local elites and their capacity to resist the center’s
exactions. In demonstrating how center-periphery relations vary
even within countries, she is able to explain why the central
authorities share power with local elites in some regions, why
they usurp power in other regions and localities, and why and
where they establish “administrative occupations” resembling
military occupations. Of particular interest, she shows in detail
that, regardless of professed ideology, the governments acted in
parallel ways when faced with similar local political
economies—be it Senghor’s Senegal, Nkhruma’s Ghana, or the
Ivory Coast. These multiple examples give her book persuasive
force. Boone’s findings challenge the dominant new
institutionalist framework, both in its historical and
rational-choice variants. For her, the institutional arrangements
are the dependent variables to be explained, and she uses
political economy and class analysis powerfully to achieve this
task. While the book’s case studies lie in Africa, her mode of
analysis can help illuminate the politics and recent histories of
other regionally divided states around the world. Political
Topographies of the African State deserves to have an impact
in the broader field of comparative research.
Atul Kohli
State-Directed Development
is theoretically ambitious, well argued and likely to have an
impact on the field. Focusing on four case studies, Atul Kohli
argues forcefully that no late-late development is possible
without substantial state intervention. He distinguishes three
ideal-type states among late-late developing countries:
neo-patrimonial, cohesive-capitalist and fragmented-multiclass
states. Analyzing economic development over the second half of the
last century in Nigeria, India, Brazil and South Korea, he shows
why a neo-patrimonial state such as Nigeria produces disastrous
economic results; why rapid industrialization is most readily
attained in repressive cohesive-capitalist states (South Korea,
especially under Park Chung Hee, exemplifies this form); while
fragmented-multiclass states (e.g., India) have attained mixed
results. This book may possibly have an impact on the field
similar to Peter Evan’s Embedded Autonomy, James
Scott’s Seeing like a State (winner of the 2000 Dogan
Award) or Robert Wade’s Governing the Market.
Review
committee for the Mattei Dogan Award: Jonathan Unger (chair), Eiko
Ikegami, and Ivan Szelenyi.
2005 Lipset Award:
Cornelia
Woll
This dissertation examines
business lobbying in the European and American air transport and
telecommunication industries. Through interviews with key
policymakers and business representatives, Woll traces how
business leaders and their representatives have sought to
influence EU and US trade policy. The two case studies illustrate
a model of “regulated competition” that resists the usual
efforts to locate trade policy on a single underlying dimension of
market integration. The dissertation also develops a theory of
preference formation in which national and transnational
institutions shape not just the interests and strategic behavior
of actors, but also actors own ideas about their identities. The
committee found this to be an original and fascinating work on a
topic of clear importance.
Heather Stoll
In many ways, Stoll’s dissertation provides a counterpoint
to Woll’s research. Heather Stoll’s dissertation provides a
methodologically sophisticated quantitative analysis of the links
between political cleavages and the party system.
Reconceptualizing Lipset and Rokkan’s classic treatment of
social cleavages, Stoll distinguishes what she calls latent,
politicized, and particized cleavages. Latent cleavages divide
sociological categories and capture the kinds of social divisions
described by Lipset and Rokkan. When such social divisions mark
lines of political conflict, Stoll speaks of political cleavages,
while particized cleavages attach party labels to political
conflicts. Through a careful analysis of electoral data from
dozens of countries, Stoll traces the effects of these bases of
political preference on the structure of the national party
systems. This is a bold yet rigorous dissertation that greatly
impressed the committee
Review committee for the Lipset
Award: Bruce Western (chair), David Apter, and G. Bingham Powell.
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